Beer engine and extract brew

[crafty john]

I have been playing around with beer engine for my second extract brew, there is one thing I am not too clear on. When I enter the volume at the top and then put in all the ingredients and calculate why does the total liquor exceed the volume of the brew and what does it mean It may sound like a dumb question but hey I am still learning.

Thanks in advance
John

[PureGuiness]

You will lose some liquor to trub / hops and boil off. That's why you need more liquor to hit a particular brew length.

The total liquor value should be the total amount needed to hit the brew length taking into consideration any losses.

[crafty john]

Have I got it right, if I want a 10 ltr brew I need to start with the total liquor volume or add some more later if my pans not big enough

[PureGuiness]

To be honest it all depends on your process. The numbers should stack up if you can boil the whole lot. I'm not sure how accurate the figures are for extract brews. They work out pretty well for my all grain brews but when I used to extract brew I only had an 11ltr pot so I bioled as close to 11ltrs that I could which resulted in a high gravity wort which I diluted in the FV.

[crafty john]

OK thanks

[OldSpeckledBadger]

Beer Engine assumes a certain amount of losses which are quite probably different from your actual losses. You can change them in the Set Defaults dialog. The only ones which are relevant to extract brewing are evaporation losses (which you can measure with a test boil using just water) and wort losses. The latter will consist of boiler dead space (again measurable) plus loss to hops which is harder to estimate but as a guide my mild uses 40g hops and I lose about 1.2 litres to them. I suggest you assume 1 litre loss to the hops. If you end up a bit short in the FV you can top up with water. That's what I do anyway and the beer always turns out great.